If we don't experience some risk, danger, knee-scrapes, falling and failure as children we don't learn how to process the big problems of adult life. That's not only true spiritually, it's true physically, socially, and brain-neurologically. Obviously, then, this affects parenting, teaching, and pastoring. But what about God? What does the Bible show us about his perspective on our failures? And then, on a more positive note, how does playfulness shape us while we are young? How does playfulness lead to innovation and success?
All in Why We Must Fail
Why all the public tantrums in western culture? People have been malformed. We have had it so good that we have, for a generation or two, protected one another from the very things we need to help us grow and mature: failure, loss, pain, embarrassment, hierarchy, conflict, and risk. Christian spirituality, because it is an earthy spirituality, a for-this-life way of living, cannot sit by idly and ignore the malformation of our children or society. What can be done?
Western culture teaches us, directly and implicitly, that failure is bad. And so we think that both we ourselves should never fail and that other people should never fail. Things are now so good that we even extend that to, "people should never have their feelings hurt." But is that good for us? Does that weaken or strengthen us? I explain why failure is not only unavoidable, but why for our own growth and societal development failure is necessary.
044 Why Do Anything Hard?
What's it like to run a marathon? What's the point of running a marathon? What was involved in earning my Ph.D.? Or, more broadly, what has caused us today to want things to be so easy? Why should you ever do something difficult? Come and laugh and think with me about something we do our diligent best to avoid: hard work.